SLOE AND EASY: VAN DONGEN AT THE MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

By Patricia Boccadoro

PARIS, 25 MARCH 2009  The
magnificent book, Van Dongen, edited by Nathalie Bondil, chief
curator of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Jean-Michel Bouhours,
chief curator of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, has recently been published
in conjunction with the exhibition Van Dongen: Painting The Town
Fauve, currently being hosted at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
(until 19 April). But while the exhibition, by its very title, tends to
concentrate on Van Dongen's 'fauvist' period, which at its height lasted
merely a couple of years, the book, more a monograph than a catalogue of
the show, gives sweeping coverage in exhaustive detail of the whole of
Kees Van Dongen's extraordinary life, which covered almost a century.

The Dutch painter, 1877 -1968, who remained on the
margin of the Fauves' history, is however best known to many amateur
art-lovers in France as the painter of Parisian high society, as the
portrait painter of celebrities, society women and
demi-mondaines, so when the magazine of the Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts writes about Van Dongen's scandalous art , about his "dazzling
and shameless paintings" and the fact that Van Dongen was an observer of
the "dregs of society," it should be pointed out that that was only part
of his work. For I possess, not a painting, alas sold years ago, but a
lithograph of an aunt, Vera, a Russian émigré who was one of van Dongen's
models, muses, and, maybe, mistresses, and who belonged to that transition
period of his life between the "Cocktail era" and that of the bohemian
artist. And Vera was not an unmarried mother or prostitute, nor was she a
nocturnal reveler.

Vera is, or was, exceedingly beautiful in a quiet,
pale, understated way. Small and slender, with huge dark almond-shaped
eyes, she resembled more one of the ballerinas the artist met at
performances of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes at the
Chatelet in Paris, rather than the buxom wenches adorning the walls of the
Canadian museum's walls. Completed in 1913, when he was beginning to move
in the most stylish Parisian circles and meeting the likes of Max Jacob
and Apollinaire, the portrait of Vera shows an elongated, elegant young
woman in "dishabille." Fauvism was already a thing of the
past, and Van Dongen's harsh, violent colours were being replaced by more
refined harmonies, as in the lithograph of Vera, which is finished in
tones of grey, green and soft blue. It was also around this time that
Paris society began to flock to his parties and to his studio to have
their portraits painted.

For, despite his claims of being an anarchist, the
postwar years saw him rapidly become the most fashionable portraitist in
Paris, when a close friendship with the fabulously wealthy Marchesa Casati
opened doors to the whole of the avant-garde society. He developed his
"wide-eyed" women, now portrayed with painted lips and bedecked with
jewels, women with "eyes as enormous as their jewels, whose carats are
depicted with rays." Some of his most beautiful works belong to this
period - paintings which include Urn with Flowers, where a
near-naked, red-haired woman is contemplating herself in a mirror,
apparently waiting for a man on horseback with a drawn sword to arrive, as
the image on the wall behind her suggests. Woman with a Blue
Greyhound, Standing Nude, Carmen Vincente Dancing,
the opera singer, Mademoiselle Genevieve Vix in the role of
Salome, Woman with Fan or Madame Lucie Gérard, and Maria
Ricotti were all completed in the early twenties. Such masterpieces
as Portrait of a Woman wearing Jewelry, Young Lady with
Lilies and the more languid and sensual Woman on a Sofa,
were completed a few years later.

Indeed, Woman on a Sofa perfectly illustrates
Van Dongen's love for long, leggy Parisian women, preferably decked out in
diaphanous silks, brocades and sequins, although in this particular
painting, the woman is voluptuously ensconced in furs. These postwar years
also saw him in the fashionable resorts of Cannes and Deauville, where his
sitters included not only the King of Belgium, but the Aga Khan and his
Begum, the former Yvette Labrousse, Miss France 1930.

Three interesting interviews in which Van Dongen
talked to Paul Guth, René Bernard and Henri Perruchot are reproduced in
the book, in which the artist talks freely about several of his paintings,
including his famous and scandalous portrait of Anatole France. He painted
the legendary French writer, he gleefully told them, as a senile old man,
"only half there." He painted old age with a rare fierceness.

Neither did he spare himself, painting self portraits
twice in the nude, once in 1895, and again in 1935 in technicolour,
full-length and facing front, with nothing left to the imagination except
to wonder why a man of 58 should be portrayed with an old man's face atop
a young man's body. A naked woman, pubic hair aglow, lurks in the
background.

But it was always women who dominated his paintings,
from his very early works until the end of his life. At first, he depicted
prostitutes and gypsies, when they were all he had to paint, then the more
beautiful society women when he had access to them, not excluding a whole
range of portraits of the latest cinema, opera and stage sensations. This
superb book gives not only a huge range of his paintings themselves, but
also a greater understanding of this mythical Dutch painter, " a force of
nature," to quote Jean-Marie Van Dongen, his only son, born in 1940 from a
second marriage to Marie-Claire.